Although the sky around the sun got blown out to fuck, I’m really happy with this spectacular cloudscape from over Dublin Bay. Going to work in the Baily Lighthouse has become a high point in my career. Every day something about the job lifts me up, like on Friday when we spotted a porpoise on […]

Currently writing a client < => server HTTP service and added some test code along the lines of “When the application starts, please GET a list of all records from the server. After you receive them DELETE the first item in the list.” Promptly forgot about it. Why ever, I wondered ten minutes later, does […]

My current task at work sees me rewriting an old application from scratch. A good part of this involves me going back and forth between the old and new project folders-call them “wigwam” and “spaklepony”-to compare code. This can be difficult to keep straight in tabs as a terminal user. A quick walk of Stack […]

The first cycle-cycle, that is, because trips to and from town in Galway don’t count. Back in Vegas I used to cycle to work: take the bus part way, cycle the balance. I stopped (no bicycle) after I got back to Ireland, so I’m looking forward to the route to Howth. There are few words […]

Stolen from Stack Overflow, this bit of regex matches odd numbers of spaces only. Last week I retabbed a work project, but didn’t catch that I replaced \t with \s instead of \s\s. Whoops. gsed -E -i -e 's/^\s(\s\s)*/& /g' src/**/*.* Per the SO link, x(xx)* will match odd numbers of x. It works.

Hey, my first road race went great! Per the chip time results: Time: 00:52:37 Distance: 10.00km Pace: 00:05:16/km Place: 143/432 (33/100 normalised) The full results from Rock and Road are pretty cool to go through and cross-reference! This is the first indication of where I fit with other runners because of how I prefer to […]

While hardly a world-shattering bit of code, I’ve found this super useful for reuse. :D FactoryBot.define do factory :email_address, class: String do skip_create transient do sequence(:address) { |n| "factory_email_#{n}@example.com" } end initialize_with do new address if address end end end Call inside a factory thus: FactoryBot.define do factory :foobar do email { create :email_address } […]

(Sorry Jenny!) At some point I’ll have to blog about Asheron’s Call and its effect on our lives. The AC community, more than any other I’ve known, came together as people in real life. For now, yeah, we had a great time over a couple of drinks in Dublin. :D

Well as you could have guessed from the runs, I went to Strandhill last weekend with a friend. My most excellent company aside, it felt so good to be back in Sligo and the northwest for its own sake. I ran, we walked, we got burned under the sun and enjoyed fantastic food and beer […]

Poem by Philip Larkin, shared with me by a friend. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and […]

Saturday’s run was Tour de Knocknarea. A friend and I spent the weekend in Strandhill in Sligo. We had our own plans made for Saturday morning, mine being to run a loop around Knocknarea. It looked easy on paper, ten kilometres in a circle back to the start. Right? Hah! The southeast side of the […]

On my first day in Gozo I ran from Victoria to Ta’ Ċenċ Cliffs and then back to town by way of Xlendi. This wasn’t my greatest run as far as they go because I didn’t realise the trail Strava said exists was a literal clifftop goat trail; I wound up having to cut across […]

Mgarr ix-Xini is a gorge on the south side of Gozo that terminates at a beautiful sheltered beach. Gozo is…compact. Towns and villages are concentrated onto high ground inland. Almost the entire coast of the island is one big trail because of this, which allowed me to go on remarkable walks along clifftops. The gorge […]